The ultimate cheating device for exams: One AAA battery and some memory inside the pencil, the display wrapped up and a single switch at the top as the input device.
Book with video: Batteries in the hardcover and the screen like a first page where video references can be looked up.
Even just a good old mobile phone display that doesn't crack under deformation is quite nice an application for this.
So the description of European cars as 'deathboxes' is a load of nonsense.
Indeed. Like any generalization.
European cars don't share any more common features than do American cars. It is true however that most European cars (I mean most by sales figures) weigh in at less than 3000 pounds average (give or take a few hundred). Also there are lots of smaller and lighter models coming in at a mere 2000 pounds.
That said, in Europe there are also horribly oversized/overweight models which are thankfully much less common: Audi Q7, BMW X5, Mercedes ML, just to name a few that can be seen relatively often in the streets of Madrid where I use to hang about. There is also the not uncommon Japanese all-terrain (Toyota Land Cruiser, Mitsubishi Montero, etc) used exclusively for commuting; but these are way less than popular nonetheless.
About street sizes, I could say about the same again. The US cities I know (which aren't many) are much better regarding width, layout, convenience, and many other factors, than the streets of Madrid. However this is accounting for all the streets, which includes many built centuries ago. There are large nice streets in most European cities I know, as well as highways that go round the city, the latter built with the pragmatic approach that if you can't cross the city then just go around it.
Therefore, you can live in Madrid (or Barcelona, or London) and drive a large SUV without getting into trouble because of the size of the car, mainly because in the old streets where the big car would have trouble, neither a big nor a small one can park by lack of space, so no sane person goes there in any sort of car except a taxi (we have our share of insane everywhere-in-my-car people, though).
I see your point. However, the noise on the oscilloscope perverts the value and creates opportunities for all those who create no richness and who therefore should not be allowed to make easy money. Why not allow those opportunities - let me explain with a thermodynamic analogy (which is arguably a car analogy on steroids)
Money is not created or destroyed in the stock markets and private business sectors, but merely changes hands. When you tie the value of a company to a stock price, the net effect is that it's easier to realize the transfer of value from one pocket to another. The money a company is worth is finite as is the money that investors want to pay for its stock. If too much money is paid for the stock, the price is inflated; of too few, it's undervalued. Both cases provoke a reaction from "the market" in the form of buy or sell orders, which by offer and demand alter the stock value.
Ok, so take that and let greed take control. What do you have? Lots and lots of transactions trying to buy when undervalued and sell when inflated. Now the system is closed. Therefore, the money that goes to try and but in the first situation is not available to invest in another activity that creates actual value. And the money that is worth my screw manufacturing company when it's overvalued is not going to buy advertising, more salespeople or better machinery: It's just making stock behave like a hot potato that nobody wants to hold.
Again, nothing in this game has anything to do with manufacturing screws. It's fair that there are investors considering and realizing benefits from long-haul investments: Those do help manufacturing screws. But those who do intra-day trading are taking money from the system that could be making screws, while what they are doing actually, is screwing the industry.
But the swing is only ten percent. The things you mention are what make up the steady part - the other ninety.
I use ten percent as an example but yes, for most big companies in the market (which is far from from every company but let's leave that aside), the swing is a small part of the price... In a single day.
However, note: (a) how big in absolute terms that swing is, and (b) how the price of a company can be inflated to way, way more than its actual value in just a couple trading days span. Examples abound and actually analysts spend quite a lot of time talking about this, with terms like "stock market investor sentiment", a fancy name for gut feeling.
Also worth a lot of discussion are the regulations in place to try to mitigate (not actually prevent) that from happening. Much in those regulations is about trying to stop information from flowing. In other words, a big part of the stock markets regulation attempts to contain the uncontainable!
The other ninety as you say is what keeps the system from exploding (well, at least more destructively than it does from time to time). But give human greed a bit more and soon we will be seeing that ninety reduced and then...
I subscribe that and add that the stock value concept is indeed useful but has been twisted beyond recognition. If I try to think about it with a clean sheet, I can't find a real reason why a company that manufactures screws is worth 10% more at noon than at 9 am and then 10% less at market close.
The company in my example behaves like most companies. They are going to open the next day and sell a bit more or a bit less, manufacture about the foreseen number of screws, some employees are going to get hired, others fired, others retire... Yet the swing in value of the whole company is based around news and rumours. Traders will "discount" this or that news on stock price of our happy screw manufacturer without even bothering about the steel stock or last month's sales. Some will buy stock and make a profit by noon if they are lucky, or loss at close if unlucky.
Now, what does all this have to do with manufacturing screws? Isn't there much more in common with Casino Royale than with industry and people building things and making a living out of creating something of value?
I attended a conference two years ago where an accountant explained that the concept of stock worth is fatally wounded. His theory, which I also agree wholeheartedly, is that stock should benefit the stockholder with dividends, i.e., with the net value generated by the company's activity. Not by the increase in the value of stock itself in the short term. Now there is a place for investors, he also said, who invest in stock and sell the stock. But that kind of operations ought to be separated by months or years, when actually the stock reflects the increase in the value of the company. Not by minutes, when the increase in value is nothing more than a throw of dice, even if you attach fancy and serious names to it.
I think the answer is "no". Which takes us back to the summary: The NSF has allocated compute hours. Nothing else. Therefore it's just a piece of the whole thing, and the other pieces (the simulation itself, getting reliable data to feed it -see GIGO-, etc) are orders of magnitude more complex.
How are those engines getting insight on your queries to Google?
I agree though that the point of this decision is for Google to make sure that they and only they get the data. Not that anybody else that might compete with them would be able to get at it easily by fair or useful means - they would have to sniff your traffic, which is not only wrong and illegal in many (most?) countries, but also impractical at a big scale and therefore useless. Still, perhaps someone would pop up the idea of giving away say free home routers in exchange for "some anonymous statistical data" (i.e., the search queries and results) that said routers could report automatically and which would probably be still quite valuable - that possibility is void now.
I have a friend who used to be a public servant at a big utility here in Spain. At one point, the gov't was uncomfortable with him in his position. Not because of his performance, but because they wanted the position for someone else. One day he made a joke about mistreatment to women, and a pretty innocent one at that; but he apologyzed immediately just in case. He was fired the same day (actually an early retirement.)
Given that you can buy a new DVD player for $30, and assuming prices end up in the same range, that is over 6% of the price paid by the consumer. Not bad for a bunch of algorithms that have zero manufacturing cost and virtually zero cost per unit sold. The other ninety-something percent needs to be shared among the companies that build, transport, market and sell the device, all of which have expenses which are, at best, proportional to the number of units sold. So MPEG-LA is the only party that always wins. When I grow old, I want to be an MPEG-LA shareholder.
In other words, payware with little value. Which of course will get fewer and fewer sales. And that explains why Nero AG needs to start selling something else without delay. What to sell? It is reasonable for a company that has quite a bit of knowledge in the CD/DVD area to jump to the next big thing in a related technology; they seem to have chosen video and in mid-jump, slammed into the brickwall of MPEG-LA.
That might work for you and for me, but not for the general public that go to the shop and buy what is offered without asking what kind of treatment did the workers involved in the manufacturing get. Public awareness?
Also I don't think exec bonuses are to blame. Execs do what they are paid for doing: Maximize profit. If I have to think on ultimate responsibility, I'd say it's the governments who create the situations that make this happen. They do it because it's what makes them get elected in the case of EU/US, or just what they think is good in the case of China: Economic development.
Have ideas on how to tweak the economics of the system that makes everybody happier? Try selling it to the government or to the corporations, depending on how far-reaching your ideas are.
Economics. The big monster we all live in, for, and from. The monster most of us despise, but nobody dares to change (at least neither fast nor deeply), and for many a good reason.
While your questions are indeed insightful, the answer is not as straightforward as if these were the rethorical questions perhaps we'd all like them to be.
Think about it. Imagine for a moment that the impossible happens and the US insists in more humane conditions. What happens then? Yes, Steve is less rich but what about the thousands of people who work to keep things going the way they are now? And that includes the factory workers. Agreed they are not living a great life, but they have a job (which they can quit if they want), and they have shelter and food. What if insisting on better conditions breaks things so much that a few hundred thousands of these workers are now redundant? How many will commit suicide the next day?
It's much more complicated than it seems, unfortunately.
Whatever your students work in, odds are that whatever the choice, something will pop up that will make that decision look less than optimal in hindsight.
The only solution to that is to use virtualization. Then your choice is only the host OS; guests can be added later on.
From a manageability point of view I'd go with a Linux distro, probably Ubuntu because it's solid, popular and easy, VirtualBox and a Windows 7 VM.
Using Mac Minis as the hosts (as someone in a previous post said) does have its advantages, not the least being making it possible to run OSX without hacking it and probably breaking the EULA (Apple is less than happy to let you run OSX on anything other than Apple hardware) Whatever the choice of host, the critical requirement is to fit all the RAM that the architecture and the budget will allow.
I'd avoid dual boot scenarios, because they add too much complexity from a management point of view and don't buy that much of an advantage unless you need to run certain applications at native speeds.
Another previous comment indicated that there is too little data to make more than a guess and I partially agree, but your description is certainly enough for this much.
While I won't justify IBM's goof, it's fair to say that slips like this happen. What can you do about it? Set up a procedure so that everything going out the door has to pass certain checks? I dare say that the solution would be much worse than the problem.
Besides, it makes for a nice Slashdot discussion with jokes and all.
Rather than benchmarking the performance, I'd make that a mere summary of the results of any of the thousand sites that will already have done that (half of them copying the results from the other half) and talk more about things that matter, i.e., things that actually define the value of each proposal:
Cost, not as in sales proposal cost but in total cost of ownership. That includes such things as power consumption, cost of support, spares, etc.
Next to the power thing, you may as well add a carbon footprint slide.
Support quality: Look for experience with each vendor's support.
After you solve that one, you still have to find a company whose techies want to live surrounded (or uncomfortably close to) quite a large amount of cows farthing, hundreds if not thousands of miles from the nearest Apple Store.
This is my current pet-peeves : flat forum and phpBB are killing the art of internet discussion.
I feel like I've departed the internet age of letters and found myself in the age of tweets.
Not to mention the almost lost art of quoting.
Sadly, those are not things that can or need to be saved; newer technology is just more convenient for more users, even if we miss some of its glamour. I believe, though, that what we miss is 99% feeling, and just 1% technology (and that 1% will eventually get a comeback in some form, though, for good ideas always prevail)
You are right: Terrorists won. There is an outstanding documental from the BBC entitled "The power of nightmares", readily availabe in YouTube, which is a real eye opener about the big picture.
It sounds like a company was simply sold a product that simply didn't fulfill the expectations raised by the seller. It could have been a car (ok, sorry, bad car analogy).
Bet it won't be the last. Luckily, this and other essential services gain resilience as years go by and many hard-working engineers figure out how to solve problems before they happen.
Slashdot Mirror
The ultimate cheating device for exams: One AAA battery and some memory inside the pencil, the display wrapped up and a single switch at the top as the input device.
Book with video: Batteries in the hardcover and the screen like a first page where video references can be looked up.
Even just a good old mobile phone display that doesn't crack under deformation is quite nice an application for this.
So the description of European cars as 'deathboxes' is a load of nonsense.
Indeed. Like any generalization.
European cars don't share any more common features than do American cars. It is true however that most European cars (I mean most by sales figures) weigh in at less than 3000 pounds average (give or take a few hundred). Also there are lots of smaller and lighter models coming in at a mere 2000 pounds.
That said, in Europe there are also horribly oversized/overweight models which are thankfully much less common: Audi Q7, BMW X5, Mercedes ML, just to name a few that can be seen relatively often in the streets of Madrid where I use to hang about. There is also the not uncommon Japanese all-terrain (Toyota Land Cruiser, Mitsubishi Montero, etc) used exclusively for commuting; but these are way less than popular nonetheless.
About street sizes, I could say about the same again. The US cities I know (which aren't many) are much better regarding width, layout, convenience, and many other factors, than the streets of Madrid. However this is accounting for all the streets, which includes many built centuries ago. There are large nice streets in most European cities I know, as well as highways that go round the city, the latter built with the pragmatic approach that if you can't cross the city then just go around it.
Therefore, you can live in Madrid (or Barcelona, or London) and drive a large SUV without getting into trouble because of the size of the car, mainly because in the old streets where the big car would have trouble, neither a big nor a small one can park by lack of space, so no sane person goes there in any sort of car except a taxi (we have our share of insane everywhere-in-my-car people, though).
I see your point. However, the noise on the oscilloscope perverts the value and creates opportunities for all those who create no richness and who therefore should not be allowed to make easy money. Why not allow those opportunities - let me explain with a thermodynamic analogy (which is arguably a car analogy on steroids)
Money is not created or destroyed in the stock markets and private business sectors, but merely changes hands. When you tie the value of a company to a stock price, the net effect is that it's easier to realize the transfer of value from one pocket to another. The money a company is worth is finite as is the money that investors want to pay for its stock. If too much money is paid for the stock, the price is inflated; of too few, it's undervalued. Both cases provoke a reaction from "the market" in the form of buy or sell orders, which by offer and demand alter the stock value.
Ok, so take that and let greed take control. What do you have? Lots and lots of transactions trying to buy when undervalued and sell when inflated. Now the system is closed. Therefore, the money that goes to try and but in the first situation is not available to invest in another activity that creates actual value. And the money that is worth my screw manufacturing company when it's overvalued is not going to buy advertising, more salespeople or better machinery: It's just making stock behave like a hot potato that nobody wants to hold.
Again, nothing in this game has anything to do with manufacturing screws. It's fair that there are investors considering and realizing benefits from long-haul investments: Those do help manufacturing screws. But those who do intra-day trading are taking money from the system that could be making screws, while what they are doing actually, is screwing the industry.
But the swing is only ten percent. The things you mention are what make up the steady part - the other ninety.
I use ten percent as an example but yes, for most big companies in the market (which is far from from every company but let's leave that aside), the swing is a small part of the price... In a single day.
However, note: (a) how big in absolute terms that swing is, and (b) how the price of a company can be inflated to way, way more than its actual value in just a couple trading days span. Examples abound and actually analysts spend quite a lot of time talking about this, with terms like "stock market investor sentiment", a fancy name for gut feeling.
Also worth a lot of discussion are the regulations in place to try to mitigate (not actually prevent) that from happening. Much in those regulations is about trying to stop information from flowing. In other words, a big part of the stock markets regulation attempts to contain the uncontainable!
The other ninety as you say is what keeps the system from exploding (well, at least more destructively than it does from time to time). But give human greed a bit more and soon we will be seeing that ninety reduced and then...
I subscribe that and add that the stock value concept is indeed useful but has been twisted beyond recognition. If I try to think about it with a clean sheet, I can't find a real reason why a company that manufactures screws is worth 10% more at noon than at 9 am and then 10% less at market close.
The company in my example behaves like most companies. They are going to open the next day and sell a bit more or a bit less, manufacture about the foreseen number of screws, some employees are going to get hired, others fired, others retire... Yet the swing in value of the whole company is based around news and rumours. Traders will "discount" this or that news on stock price of our happy screw manufacturer without even bothering about the steel stock or last month's sales. Some will buy stock and make a profit by noon if they are lucky, or loss at close if unlucky.
Now, what does all this have to do with manufacturing screws? Isn't there much more in common with Casino Royale than with industry and people building things and making a living out of creating something of value?
I attended a conference two years ago where an accountant explained that the concept of stock worth is fatally wounded. His theory, which I also agree wholeheartedly, is that stock should benefit the stockholder with dividends, i.e., with the net value generated by the company's activity. Not by the increase in the value of stock itself in the short term. Now there is a place for investors, he also said, who invest in stock and sell the stock. But that kind of operations ought to be separated by months or years, when actually the stock reflects the increase in the value of the company. Not by minutes, when the increase in value is nothing more than a throw of dice, even if you attach fancy and serious names to it.
I think the answer is "no". Which takes us back to the summary: The NSF has allocated compute hours. Nothing else. Therefore it's just a piece of the whole thing, and the other pieces (the simulation itself, getting reliable data to feed it -see GIGO-, etc) are orders of magnitude more complex.
How are those engines getting insight on your queries to Google?
I agree though that the point of this decision is for Google to make sure that they and only they get the data. Not that anybody else that might compete with them would be able to get at it easily by fair or useful means - they would have to sniff your traffic, which is not only wrong and illegal in many (most?) countries, but also impractical at a big scale and therefore useless. Still, perhaps someone would pop up the idea of giving away say free home routers in exchange for "some anonymous statistical data" (i.e., the search queries and results) that said routers could report automatically and which would probably be still quite valuable - that possibility is void now.
I have a friend who used to be a public servant at a big utility here in Spain. At one point, the gov't was uncomfortable with him in his position. Not because of his performance, but because they wanted the position for someone else. One day he made a joke about mistreatment to women, and a pretty innocent one at that; but he apologyzed immediately just in case. He was fired the same day (actually an early retirement.)
It seems some things are pretty universal.
Given that you can buy a new DVD player for $30, and assuming prices end up in the same range, that is over 6% of the price paid by the consumer. Not bad for a bunch of algorithms that have zero manufacturing cost and virtually zero cost per unit sold. The other ninety-something percent needs to be shared among the companies that build, transport, market and sell the device, all of which have expenses which are, at best, proportional to the number of units sold. So MPEG-LA is the only party that always wins. When I grow old, I want to be an MPEG-LA shareholder.
Bloatware is all that's left.
In other words, payware with little value. Which of course will get fewer and fewer sales. And that explains why Nero AG needs to start selling something else without delay. What to sell? It is reasonable for a company that has quite a bit of knowledge in the CD/DVD area to jump to the next big thing in a related technology; they seem to have chosen video and in mid-jump, slammed into the brickwall of MPEG-LA.
For me it's the little extra that rounds it up. But of course, shiny without excellent engineering (both HW and SW) doesn't cut it.
Vote for #2. I also dare say that if he had a conscience, he wouldn't much enjoy the honor.
That might work for you and for me, but not for the general public that go to the shop and buy what is offered without asking what kind of treatment did the workers involved in the manufacturing get. Public awareness?
Also I don't think exec bonuses are to blame. Execs do what they are paid for doing: Maximize profit. If I have to think on ultimate responsibility, I'd say it's the governments who create the situations that make this happen. They do it because it's what makes them get elected in the case of EU/US, or just what they think is good in the case of China: Economic development.
Have ideas on how to tweak the economics of the system that makes everybody happier? Try selling it to the government or to the corporations, depending on how far-reaching your ideas are.
I think we are drifting towards the Public Choice theory.
Economics. The big monster we all live in, for, and from. The monster most of us despise, but nobody dares to change (at least neither fast nor deeply), and for many a good reason.
While your questions are indeed insightful, the answer is not as straightforward as if these were the rethorical questions perhaps we'd all like them to be.
Think about it. Imagine for a moment that the impossible happens and the US insists in more humane conditions. What happens then? Yes, Steve is less rich but what about the thousands of people who work to keep things going the way they are now? And that includes the factory workers. Agreed they are not living a great life, but they have a job (which they can quit if they want), and they have shelter and food. What if insisting on better conditions breaks things so much that a few hundred thousands of these workers are now redundant? How many will commit suicide the next day?
It's much more complicated than it seems, unfortunately.
Whatever your students work in, odds are that whatever the choice, something will pop up that will make that decision look less than optimal in hindsight.
The only solution to that is to use virtualization. Then your choice is only the host OS; guests can be added later on.
From a manageability point of view I'd go with a Linux distro, probably Ubuntu because it's solid, popular and easy, VirtualBox and a Windows 7 VM.
Using Mac Minis as the hosts (as someone in a previous post said) does have its advantages, not the least being making it possible to run OSX without hacking it and probably breaking the EULA (Apple is less than happy to let you run OSX on anything other than Apple hardware) Whatever the choice of host, the critical requirement is to fit all the RAM that the architecture and the budget will allow.
I'd avoid dual boot scenarios, because they add too much complexity from a management point of view and don't buy that much of an advantage unless you need to run certain applications at native speeds.
Another previous comment indicated that there is too little data to make more than a guess and I partially agree, but your description is certainly enough for this much.
Happy hunting.
While I won't justify IBM's goof, it's fair to say that slips like this happen. What can you do about it? Set up a procedure so that everything going out the door has to pass certain checks? I dare say that the solution would be much worse than the problem.
Besides, it makes for a nice Slashdot discussion with jokes and all.
I also agree.
Rather than benchmarking the performance, I'd make that a mere summary of the results of any of the thousand sites that will already have done that (half of them copying the results from the other half) and talk more about things that matter, i.e., things that actually define the value of each proposal:
and so on.
After you solve that one, you still have to find a company whose techies want to live surrounded (or uncomfortably close to) quite a large amount of cows farthing, hundreds if not thousands of miles from the nearest Apple Store.
This is my current pet-peeves : flat forum and phpBB are killing the art of internet discussion.
I feel like I've departed the internet age of letters and found myself in the age of tweets.
Not to mention the almost lost art of quoting.
Sadly, those are not things that can or need to be saved; newer technology is just more convenient for more users, even if we miss some of its glamour. I believe, though, that what we miss is 99% feeling, and just 1% technology (and that 1% will eventually get a comeback in some form, though, for good ideas always prevail)
You are right: Terrorists won. There is an outstanding documental from the BBC entitled "The power of nightmares", readily availabe in YouTube, which is a real eye opener about the big picture.
Welcome our VMware balloon driver overlord.
Which is disabled by software anyway
Am I alone in thinking that perhaps NASA should try and limit their use of acronyms?
It sounds like a company was simply sold a product that simply didn't fulfill the expectations raised by the seller. It could have been a car (ok, sorry, bad car analogy).
For two hours, about 4 years ago news in Spanish about the incident
Bet it won't be the last. Luckily, this and other essential services gain resilience as years go by and many hard-working engineers figure out how to solve problems before they happen.